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Field Guide · Discovery & Layering

What should discovery tell me before I present?

Six things, statable in their words: the problem and its history, why now, how they decide, the hot button, the desired outcome, and the criteria they'll judge by. The playbook's discovery targets double as the gate — if any of the six is missing, you don't have a presentation yet; you have a product tour.

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The short answer

The six targets

  1. The surface issue, layered. What is wrong, in their description, with the layers underneath it.
  2. The history. How long, what's been tried, what happened each time.
  3. The why-now. The change or final straw that put you in the room.
  4. The decision process. Who decides, how, and on what timeline.
  5. The hot button. Primary, with the secondaries ranked under it.
  6. The desired outcome and criteria. What done-right looks like, and how they'll judge companies — including what stopped the last decision.

How it runs

The gate is a kindness to the presentation

Every item on the list is a place a presentation draws from: emphasis from the hot button, framing from the outcome, proof from the criteria, urgency from the history and the trigger. Presenting with a gap doesn't produce a slightly weaker presentation — it produces a generic one, and generic presentations are what “we want to think about it” is made of. When the check fails on one item, you don't need another hour of questions; you need the two or three that close that gap. Then you present.

Go deeper

Where the full treatment lives

The stepProbing & LayeringThe playbook whose targets these are. Next guideHow do I turn discovery into the presentation?Spending all six targets in the presentation build. Related guideHow deep should I layer?The stopping rule the gate formalizes.

Run it in a round before you run it in a home

The moves in this guide are graded in Spar's rounds — Round 1 is free, the full camp is $29/month. Spar before you knock.

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